Intelligence agent Arthur Kemp appears to have knowledge of a wider plot behind Chris Hani’s assassination, writes Stefaans Brmmer
ARTHUR KEMP, the right-wing journalist who gave address details for a “hit list” to Chris Hani’s killers, had links with the old National Intelligence Service (NIS) – raising new questions about possible complicity or foreknowledge in official agencies.
The Mail & Guardian has also confirmed the identity of one of two NIS “handlers” involved with one-time Civil Co-operation Bureau agent Eugene Riley. The handlers allegedly received intelligence reports from Riley warning of Hani’s impending assassination. Riley died in an unsolved shooting in early 1994, but his girlfriend, Julie Wilken, has confirmed she typed the reports.
The reports, revealed in the M&G a fortnight ago, correctly specified April 10 1993 as the date Hani would be killed, and claimed members of the African National Congress’s security and intelligence structures would be involved. Wilken has claimed at least one of the reports reached Riley’s handlers before the assassination.
Kemp, who at different times worked for The Citizen and rightwing publication Die Patriot, was arrested after the assassination. He was used as a state witness in the trial of Conservative Party politician Clive Derby-Lewis and Polish immigrant Janusz Walus, who are both serving life sentences.
In their trial Kemp testified how he had supplied a list with addresses – which he claimed he believed would be used so demonstrations could be held at the homes of enemies of the right wing – to Gaye Derby-Lewis, wife of Clive Derby-Lewis. The prosecution contended the list of 10 names had been a hit list. Hani’s name appeared third on the list, after Nelson Mandela and Joe Slovo.
Intelligence and police sources have confirmed to the M&G that Kemp, a former police security branch member, had been an informant for the NIS. It is alleged that after the assassination the NIS decided to play “open cards” with FW de Klerk’s government: the agency told the then- president of its relationship with Kemp, while denying that Kemp had acted in an official capacity.
But in a new twist Kemp, who moved to Britain last year, recently contacted a London publication, claiming to have knowledge of a wider plot behind Hani’s death. He did not give details.
Kemp’s claim of a wider plot echoes a similar one by Mohammed Amin Laher, whom Wilken has identified as a double agent for Riley and the ANC’s then-Department of Intelligence and Security (DIS), and as the source of Riley’s information on the impending assassination. Laher has claimed in a call from an undisclosed location that Hani’s death involved a conspiracy “on both sides of the spectrum”.
While Wilken and some of Riley’s former associates believe Riley had fed the information to the old department of military intelligence, the M&G this week confirmed that the addressees on the documents – identified in the documents only as “P&F” – were in fact two NIS members who at the time operated under the false company name of Jacaranda Pamphlets, an NIS front.
“P”, whose name has been supplied to the M&G but who cannot be named for legal reasons, specialised in gathering information on the right wing in the early 1990s and also had extensive contact with DIS members when they returned from exile after the unbanning of the ANC. He was instrumental in setting up links between DIS and NIS members in the negotiations that led to the amalgamation of the two intelligence bodies to become the new National Intelligence Agency.
“P”, who now works from the agency’s head office in Pretoria, this week denied having received the documents or having known Riley. Agency liaison officer Willem Thron declined comment, saying the matter concerned the “now-defunct NIS”.
In other developments:
* One of the original members of the DIS team that did an investigation on behalf of the ANC into the assassination confirmed Hani had had fears about his own security and had unsuccessfully agitated with the ANC to step up his security.
He said the DIS investigation had found evidence of a second killer or group of killers, besides Walus, whom the DIS believed had been involved. He said this was based on an eyewitness report of a second car besides Walus’s; on the angle of a bullet which seemed to have come from a different direction to where Walus had been standing, and on evidence that someone had been hiding behind a wall next door to Hani’s Boksburg home at the time of the assassination.
He claimed police at the time had been “unwilling” to follow the leads uncovered by the DIS investigation.
* The documents in the M&G’s possession are only part of a much larger collection of information which Riley had fed to “P&F” at the NIS, a large proportion of them supposedly based on information supplied by Laher.
A senior serving intelligence official, formerly with DIS, has confirmed the existence of the documents, which deal with matters as divergent as arms smuggling, politicians’ affairs and a supposed plot to use a computer programme to favour the ANC in the elections. But he claimed the information contained in the documents often had no bearing on reality.
The question remains, however, how Riley and Laher could have had foreknowledge of the assassination plot, and how they could have remained in the NIS information- gathering chain if they had supplied consistently false information.
* Hani and another leading South African Communist Party leader had repeated contact with an askari, a former ANC member “turned” by the police security branch, who “turned” again and clandestinely gave the SACP information on security branch matters. Shortly before the assassination, the askari warned Hani that things were “becoming hot” for him